Form: Argument

THE NATURAL LAW ON PORNOGRAPHY

(from twitter)

—“Do you believe that banning all porn is ridiculous? If so, how come? What would the laws under the Propertarian constitution be regarding porn?”—@EnlightenedNPC

This is a deeper question than it appears – a hard topic for twitter. I’ll try:

a) we must keep it out of the commons, and the internet is a commons, so there must be some ‘gateway’ (opt in) in order to access it.

b) long term effects are far far worse in every regard than we imagined. And;

c) there is some very bad behavior at the lower end of the market.

Under natural law if its out of the commons, it’s voluntary, then it’s not a subject for P-law. The rest is just either a product harm (tort), or baiting into hazard (tort), for the law’s Market to solve.

I am fairly sure that the legal market would solve it rather quickly under p-law and we would be left with high production value work by studios on one end, and selfies on the other. That’s because baiting into hazard (enticing people in vulnerable positions into such behavior for money) would be prosecutable by anyone – not just the victim. It would be almost impossible to produce anything outside of a studio system with professionals, because it’s almost impossible to avoid baiting into hazard otherwise.

And beyond that it’s a Political question (“We just don’t want it here”), or an empirical question (“Accumulate evidence and inability to voluntarily or institutionally regulate means we have to ban it.”).

Personally (not the natural law) I have come to understand that while I’m intuitively libertarian, the experiment with porn has (a surprise to me) demonstrated that it’s a net negative, but that it is better to regulate a net negative than it is to turn it into a black market. I’d ban it in my neck of the woods. But my opinion doesn’t mean anything. it’s just a preference.

My posts on Pornography are here:

https://propertarianism.com/?s=pornography